Word: landa
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...acted in movies, he acted on television, he acted on the stage, and after all that time, it was Quentin Tarantino, the master of casting familiar actors in revelatory roles (see John Travolta, Kurt Russell, Robert Forster), who gave Waltz his juiciest piece of work. As Colonel Hans Landa, the "Jew hunter" of last year's World War II spaghetti western Inglourious Basterds, the 53-year-old Austrian delivered a charmingly evil performance. He is the favorite to win this year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar. (See TIME's 2010 Oscar Predictions...
...merits are not. The eponymous Nazi hunters (led by Lt. Aldo Raine, played by the excellent Brad Pitt) provide much of the film’s entertainment value but are not its most interesting feature. The most remarkable strand of the plot follows the unnervingly charming SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) in his quest to hunt down the Jews of France. The opening scene of the movie consists of little more than a 15-minute long conversation between Landa and a French dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite. Slowly and inevitably, Landa breaks down LaPadite’s resistance, reducing...
...officer, Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), is a nastily smooth operator: oozing charm like pus, with a courtly tone and a preening self-regard. Known as the Jew Hunter, he calls himself a detective, trying to stop a war crime. Among his suspects are a French Jewess, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who has escaped Landa's grasp and now runs a movie theater in Paris; and Bridget Von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a leading lady of German cinema who is secretly in league with British intelligence. Many Tarantino movies are female revenge fantasies, in which strong women plot...
...Laurent, Kruger and Waltz (who earned the Best Actor award at Cannes in May) are the soul of the film. Their conversations percolate with menace because Tarantino plants plot elements that blossom later for maximum impact. When Colonel Landa asks one of the ladies for her shoe and, at a restaurant, orders milk for the other, you feel nooses tightening around their necks and yours. In these scenes and another in a basement bar where the smallest wrong gesture cues a bloodbath, Tarantino shows how to achieve drama through whispers and forced smiles. The parallel plot of a budding romance...
...Waltz has the purring efficiency of a sleek German vehicle, not a tank but a Mercedes-Benz; he could take Cannes' Best Actor prize on Sunday night. The movie is pretty scrupulously played in the languages its characters would speak - except for one odd moment early on, when Landa tells the French farmer, "I ask your permission to speak English for the rest of the conversation." (He and the film have a reason for this...